A process of developing image-exposed silver halide grains using an aromatic primary amine compound as a color developing agent and forming color images by coupling the oxidation product of the color developing agent formed thereby with color couplers is a conventionally known technique which has been widely utilized in silver salt photography.
One of important themes in the photographic field is to improve productivity in the laboratory and to shorten the waiting time for customers to receive photographic processing of color photographic materials as quickly as possible.
The easiest process for quickly carrying out photographic processing of photographic light-sensitive materials is to activate the reaction by increasing the processing temperature, and great shortening of the processing time has already been achieved by this practice.
On the other hand, recently, many inventions relating to techniques for carrying out quick processing using silver halide grains having a high content of silver chloride are proposed, e.g., in JP-A-58-95345, JP-A-59-232342, and JP-A-60-19140 (the term "JP-A" as used herein means an "unexamined published Japanese patent application").
By using the high silver chloride content silver halide grains, color development processing time, which has hitherto been required to be longer than 3 minutes, can be shortened below 1 minute. But it has been found that when it is intended to further shorten the processing time below 30 seconds, the quality of color images is likely to be reduced and, in particular, image unevenness is likely to occur.
Also, as a process for quickly carrying out a development process, a technique of using a color development accelerator (as described, e.g., in JP-A-53-15831, JP-A-55-62450, JP-A-55-62451, JP-A-55-62452, JP-A-55-52453, JP-B-51-12422, and JP-B-55-49728) (the term "JP-B" as used herein means an "examined Japanese patent publication") and a technique of using a so-called auxiliary developing agent such as 3-pyrazolidone, etc., are known. But the photographic light-sensitive materials using the auxiliary developing agent have the disadvantage that storage stability is insufficient.
On the other hand, JP-A-51-139323, JP-A-59-171947, and British Patent 2,109,576A disclose that by incorporating a compound of a metal belonging to Group VIII of the Periodic Table in a photographic light-sensitive material, a high sensitivity is obtained and also reciprocity law failure is improved.
Also, JP-B-49-33781, JP-A-50-23618, JP-A-52-18310, JP-A-58-15952, JP-A-59-214028, JP-A-61-67845, German Patents 2,226,877 and 2,708,466, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,703,584 disclose that by incorporating a rhodium compound or an iridium compound in a photographic light-sensitive material, an increase in contrast and improvement in reciprocity law failure are attained. However, there is no description of the stability with the foregoing very quick photographic processing in the above publications.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 4,269,927 discloses that by incorporating cadmium, lead, copper, zinc or a mixture thereof in the inside of the silver halide grains of a surface latent image-type high silver chloride emulsion having a silver halide content of at least 80 mol %, a high sensitivity is obtained. Also, JP-B-48-35373 discloses that by incorporating a water-soluble iron compound in a silver chloride emulsion obtained by a successive mixing method, a black and white photographic paper having a high contrast is obtained at a low cost. Furthermore, JP-A-1-18364 discloses the technique of obtaining a high sensitivity and further reducing the sensitivity deviation due to the temperature change at light exposure by locating silver bromide-localized phases on the inside or the surface of silver halide grains of a high silver chloride content emulsion containing iron ions.
However, there is no disclosure regarding the stability in the foregoing very quick photographic processes described in the above publications.
In such circumstances, it has been found that when color development is carried out in a very short time of not longer than 30 seconds, it appears that the time dependence of the development progress becomes large, whereby a local unevenness is likely to be caused in the color density and good color images can not stably obtained. It shall be noticed that the problem being solved is the developability of silver halide grains in the very early stage, but there is no solution to the problem from a practical point of view.